Marcone: Rise To Power
by Venusian
Summary: A child is born to a life of poverty, abuse, and hopelessness. He will become the most powerful crime lord of his time. This is his story.
1. Chapter 1

**If you look at history, the great men and women of the world have always been defined by their enemies.**

**Lex Luthor**

My journey began when I was approximately seven years old. Though my social position as leader of organized crime would require more than a decade to achieve—a position I continue to refine even to this day—the process of designing and constructing myself into one of the elites of the world actually began when I found myself clever enough to visit a library: by an estimated age of seven.

My age has always been an estimate.

My birth had been of little significance to the people who sired me; my parents never bothered with telling me the actual date, if they even remembered. I calculated my age by the size and height range compared to the other Brooklyn crack children.

My parents were scum. Scum that created scum, attracted scum, and made fellow scum even filthier through their "professions": my father sold drugs. My mother was a self-employed whore. I was—by my estimate—seven years old when she was killed.

The news of her death came to me by the mockery of my peers (children in Brooklyn being not only feral, but largely incapable of understanding the concept of empathy, much less exhibiting any.) One of them had seen the incident that took my mother's life: she had stolen an unknown amount of my father's methamphetamines, injected them into her system, and committed suicide by fainting in front of an oncoming city bus.

My father's face stayed emotionless when he heard me relay the news. He then returned to his stash of drugs, checked over the inventory, and said in a voice devoid of any feeling at all: "At least the slut didn't OD here. Hidin' a body's a bitch."

When I inquired as to whom he meant to hide her from, he sullenly nodded out in the direction of the street. "Cops. Lawyers. The rich fuckers in th' system that wanna lock up you'n me, just cuz we gots the balls to do shit they say we shouldn' do."

I couldn't make out why anyone rich enough to be in The System would want to lock us up.

"Cuz we ain't _slaves_, boy. We don't do what they tell us to do, jus' cuz they say it. We gots more freedom th'n the fuckin' _pilgrims_, an' the rich don't like nonna that shit."

When I told him I felt that wasn't right, he cuffed me on the side of the head hard enough to send me to the floor. "_Right_, that's a laugh. Ain't right I hitcha, but I jus' did."

I did not care about the blow; his heart hadn't been in it, and I was used to being hit. All I cared about was finding out if there was anyone stronger than the cops and lawyers and various other members of the system. When I asked, my father only shook his head and reached into his pocket for his lighter.

"Nobody's stronger'n The System."

Even at seven, my instincts for how the world really worked were already developing. I pointed out that someone had to be stronger, or at least just _as_ strong, otherwise the System would get lazy and weaken. And besides, the cops had guns—they had to use the weapons against some kind of enemy.

"Dunno 'bout being stronger. Only fuckers that'd scare the boys in blue used to be gangsters from back in th' day. When Al Capone said jump, them fucks wouldn't even ask how high."

"Al Capone?" I am fairly certain that this was the first time in my life I'd ever heard the name. "Who's Al Capone?"

"Dead guy. You don' need ta know." And that ended our talk.

This was the longest, most helpful conversation my father and I ever had.

It provided me with the only true lesson I'd ever received from his lips: the strong—the wealthy, and powerful, and influential—ruled over the weak. The weak are those who followed rules. The strong make the rules, and make punishments for those who don't follow the rules.

I knew, by some instinct, that both of my parents didn't follow the rules. And the reason all of our lives were in such pitiful condition was probably from the fact that they were hiding from their punishments.

This did not strike me as fair or unfair. Understand: I was raised in the slums. The concepts of fairness and justice do not exist in such a jungle. To complain of injustice or unfairness is as useful as complaining that an empty stomach keeps you awake at night.

No: the knowledge gained from that conversation with my father, coupled with the casual destruction of my mother's life—done by her own hand—struck me instead as a reason to make _myself_ strong. She was taken from me because her life was that of weakness and addiction. I understood that if I remained where I was—a dealer's son in Brooklyn—my life would someday become a copy of my parents…and I would be just as weak, just as dead, just as likely to throw myself in front of a city bus.

The most reasonable solution, to my young mind, was to make myself stronger.

But even if I did, I could be beat up by people who were stronger. If I instead made myself smarter, I could be outsmarted by people who had better mental capacities and education. And if I tried to become part of The System, I would be bound by rules and regulations and become a slave to those who created the rules. How could I get past these problems?

The answer seemed obvious.

My father had taught me that the title that meant "thestrongest" was the title of _gangster_.

I undertook my own investigation into the nature of gangsters, and how one became such a person. To ask anyone in the slums and ghettos of New York would have been futile; I would have gotten more useful answers from my reflection in a broken mirror.

Over the course of some weeks, my investigation took me on longer scouting expeditions into uptown. There, I discovered a library, and for the first time I found what the odd collection of papers and cardboard covers called "books" were actually used for. I came to understand why all the smartest, richest, and most powerful people in the world liked to read.

Because reading was magic.

A form of psychic magic, to be precise. Experiences could be had by staring at a page. The thoughts of men long dead could still be "heard" years later—across space and time, _beyond the grave_—through the simple act of writing. Anything that a person could want to know could be found inside a library. And I learned that an individual's intelligence could be gauged by how fast he could read.

The smartest people were at the library every day. These were "librarians," and they knew everything about everything, to my young mind. I knew only two things of importance: the first was that I knew what I wanted to become, and the second being that I would have to learn how to read in order to get there.

I also knew that I could grow to be as old as my father and never have the ability to read a stop sign. My father was illiterate. And he intended on making me his clone.

The day after my mother's suicide, I entered the family business under my father's guidance. He taught me every detail of growing marijuana, dealing cocaine, and creating methamphetamines in a junkyard lab, an activity which turned out to be surprisingly technical, requiring considerable expertise, as the creation of the drug is highly dangerous. Many meth labs are prone to explosions. The only reason that ours stayed intact, I believe, is because neither of us partook of the substance.

Distribution was another task I was taught. Many a wandering policeman's eye has stayed fixed upon my shady-looking father and his "customers" while I, invisible to all but my peers, would deposit vials of the drug in designated dropoff points in child-friendly areas. I cannot count the amount of playgrounds I used to visit all around the city, spending only enough time to dig in the sandbox deep enough to uncover a tin can, collect several rolled bills, and leave a vial in its stead before returning to my father's side and walking to the next dropoff point. The customers would, in turn, have their own children run to the dropoff points, dig the drugs out of their hiding holes, and deliver them to the buyer. It was a thriving little business.

I very shortly discovered that I surpassed my father in this work, creating the drug and distributing it faster than his average rate, although he'd been a meth dealer longer than I'd been alive. For a time, I'd arrogantly assumed it was because of some innate superiority of intellect or character. I discovered how wrong I was when my father decided he no longer needed to work at all, beyond purchasing ingredients and materials, calculating prices, and finding potential clients.

My skills at working had nothing to do with being superior. It was simply because I was a good slave, and I would be rewarded with food and drink and a place to sleep that night.

The only way that I found myself superior to my father was in the diligence I was willing to exercise in pursuit of my plan to become a gangster. My father watched over me every second. He had learned all too well to read my face—over which I, not yet eight, had little control. If he suspected that I might be hiding a measure of cocaine, or producing excess meth and selling it myself, I would endure a memorable beating and would spend the next day—or several—chained to the meth lab table that was bolted to the concrete floor. I never gave up trying, and eventually I hit upon a workable tactic.

Running around the city, I met various beggars and homeless people who carried cans filled with the spare change of people, having sank so low in life that they did not have any honor left to keep them from asking for handouts. My travels from playground to playground involved crossing the paths of these beggars and their cans filled with money.

Through a judicious bit of bartering, I managed to strike several deals with three of them. I could trade the excess of my father's meth for various other drugs, and in turn trade _those_ drugs for money and, of all things, education. It took me seventeen interviews with different beggars before I found one, Scary Larry, who knew how to read and was willing to teach me how.

Later, after my father was safely snoring in his cot, I would pull out my profits of coins and dollar bills from the inside of my socks and hide them away again around our hovel.

At that age, I was already an experienced contingency planner. I had secreted four different stashes around our home, each more difficult to find than the last. These were used when my father actually caught me with money—which I made sure that he did, every few months. On these occasions, after the customary beating, he would force me to tearfully "reveal" the location of my treasure, and I would oh so reluctantly lead him to one of the stashes and part with five or more dollars in coins.

What my father never caught on to was that my main stash was hidden on—or rather, inside—my own body. My education with Scary Larry taught me enough to know how to convert a few bills of cash and several pounds of coins into a single, twenty-dollar note, and then that note into something worth more. And it was through my education, brought to me by the low society of my city, that I learned that the most efficient way to conceal something was to put it in a place where nobody wanted to look.

In short: a body cavity.

By the time I was ready to leave Brooklyn forever, I had five hundred and fourteen dollars to call my own. A king's ransom. With judicious trading in the neighborhoods south of my downtown slum, especially at garage sales and pawn shops, I was able to purchase clothing, adequate food, a bicycle with fresh tires, and something that I desired most in the world: a bus ticket to Chicago. As I left the city of my birth, I looked back only once, to make certain that my father wasn't following me.

I was, approximately, eleven years old.


	2. Chapter 2

**There is no new problem that you can have...with parents, with school, with a bully, with _anything..._ that someone hasn't already solved or written about in a book.**

**Will Smith**

Immediately upon arrival to the Windy City, I spent the last of my money on a library card.

It was here that I ran into my first true stroke of fortune: the librarians took notice of me, my Oliver Twist complexion of grime and gauntness, and took me under their collective protective wings. I was handed over soon after to an orphanage, where I was supposed to wait to be rescued by caring foster parents (a solution, I quickly realized, that was about as common as successful political assassination in America).

In the orphanage I received education on a different plane: mathematics, literature, history, science—I examined these subjects, learned how they might prove to be advantageous, and devoured them. During our times that we children were encouraged to play outside, I only participated in games that might develop the same skills necessary for survival in the real world—one never knows just how strategic a game of dodgeball can be until one has focused on eliminating the faster opponents first.

Historical literature became my favorite subject to study. I read the minds of any man that had achieved some kind of greatness in his life, and I became an expert at noticing shared patterns in their behavior. I luxuriated in the springs of high language well spoken; books holding the accounts of aristocracy became chalices of wine to me, and I drank deep. To the surprise of my guardians, I also developed a fascination with comic books. For a child who read the biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt between classes, it was the closest thing to a breath of normalcy that I was ever assumed to breathe.

Which was, of course, all a ruse.

I began to see the power available by treating purely fictitious characters as flesh-and-blood mentors. Superhero comic books are goldmines of strong, intelligent models: one does not have to search very hard to see the wisdom in Batman's devotion to preparedness, or how a man like Green Arrow, focusing on his one sole talent, could enter a society of mythological gods as an equal. With nothing but the strength of his mind, even Lex Luthor can battle Superman into a stalemate.

My ability to stay with the orphanage was to span the remaining seven years of my adolescence until I became eighteen. After three years, when I had determined that I had learned all that my guardians could teach, I departed the orphanage in the late hours of a moonless night.

It was that act, leaving behind a perfectly comfortable life of normalcy and safety—a life of three meals a day, a warm bed to sleep in, shelter against the cold, and companions to call friends—that proved to myself that I am not like other people, be they child or adult, drug dealer or teacher, beggar or billionaire. I have sometimes wondered if the root of that difference might lie in my ability to give up all that I have, in order to trade it for a mere opportunity to gain something more.

I immediately went in search of a new family—a particular family for which a great deal of service would be required. The position I sought was far removed from the humble orphanage that I had fled; I intended to become a foot soldier in the employ of a crime family.

The Gazzo family were old-money Sicilian, and to be a part of their conglomerate was to be a part of one of the wealthiest families of Chicago. Being largely broke save for a few dollars, and dressed in the customary teenager's T shirt and ripped denim jeans, I undertook to change my appearance through some judicious prospecting.

There is a particular kind of individual—again, social status is irrelevant—who is utterly incapable of thinking that their home might be broken into. These individuals might reside in well-to-do neighborhoods, or gated communities, or trailer parks. No matter the location, it is safe to assume that someone, somewhere, within at least a one mile radius, will have a home with a laughable security system. A doorknob and deadbolt do not a security system make.

It was possible to find houses so well stocked with riches and valuables that the people who lived there might not even notice that a certain necklace was missing, or one of the fifteen different Omega watches simply gone. Over the next two months I was able to steal enough valuables to make me look presentable; I made certain to steal things that I could use, like clothing and weapons—handguns being my favorite, yet pocketknives were almost always put to more use. Other items like a certain long dead aunt's silver earrings, or a decorative katana placed on a stand (bought, no doubt, by a stock broker with delusions of samurai grandeur) were always welcome in any one of Chicago's innumerable pawn shops.

I collected enough stolen merchandise to purchase a month's rent in a middle class apartment building. When I had finally stolen a flashy Yamaha motorcycle and helmet, I was ready to begin my new life. I became a Gazzo foot soldier.

To some, this would seem a case of one step forward, two steps back. As far as self-creation goes, it was exactly the opposite: a foot soldier in a mafia crime family is often depicted as an idiotic fool barely scraping by, living on the scraps provided by his high-life-living superiors. But there is more to being a foot soldier than simply obeying orders to intimidate this shop owner, or deliver that mystery package to the other side of town, or beat seven rival foot soldiers to death and leave the eighth one paralyzed yet able to relay a stern message to his boss.

There is education to be had from such a position. The politics of crime. The efficiency of quick action. The surprisingly technical expertise of how to find an illegal street weapon and make it untraceable to a murder. And then you have the minefield of strategy.

A mafia war is as far beyond a gang war as an atomic bomb is beyond a bow and arrow. At the orphanage I had learned about the great criminal gang bosses of history could be shaped over time to be seen as liberators and figureheads—useful ends in The System. In the middle of a war between two mafia families, it is impossible for any side to come out on top as the good guys; by the time one side is killed off, there has been so much collateral damage that the victorious family is forever stained as murderers and evildoers instead of protagonists.

Such was the situation that I found myself in when I joined the Gazzo family. They needed as many soldiers as possible, and I—in my designer suit, expensive bike, and willingness to do anything to progress my life forward—was a perfect candidate for a young man with balls.

The normal progress through a criminal underworld from soldier to general varies by whoever you ask. I was able to determine by my own calculations that the average span of service was seventeen years; ten years as a foot soldier, and seven years working your way up the ladder before finally being adopted as "one of the family."

I was adopted in five.

My rapid ascension was due, in part, to the same obsessive diligence that enabled me to escape my father and the slums of my birth, but it was also due to the self education I undertook during every spare moment. Sons and daughters of the criminally luxurious lifestyle cannot comprehend the actual value of information. No strategy is useless to a strategist, and the limits of strategies for solving problems are, to your average foot soldier, normally reduced to shooting whoever is providing your problem in the first place and getting wasted that night in celebration.

Or, if you possess a mind like mine, you design your solution to solve three problems at once.

The twenty-something aged children who were my fellow foot soldiers had no concept of the tension between healthy rejuvenation and wasteful self-destruction. When assigned to remove an incoming swarm of Colombian coke dealers, for example, my supposed peers amassed a truly alarming collection of dead Colombian bodies lying in the streets to attract attention. Many of their body counts were in the double digits; the most pacifistic of my comrades killed no less than seven.

I had a conversation with two.

After my conversation, there were no more Colombian coke dealers. Say what you will about the fear inspired by mass murders; it also breeds intense hatred, both of which combine to produce another costly and inefficient war. Better to tell the Colombian general and his boss that a feud is building within the Gazzo family itself, threatening to rip the family in half and weaken them to nothing—but a war against a common enemy would unite them a make them strong once more. Better to wait for a year, let the family weaken itself, then come back and take them out in one shot, huh?

After nearly every assignment I was given, I would be paid handsomely. After paying for my monthly bills of rent and board, the remaining money would be spent on various types of education in the form of books, videos, and online courses. I studied business strategies formed by Donald Trump. I listened to audiobooks by self help gurus. I practiced seduction techniques found in the writings of Giacomo Casanova. Whatever I could possibly use in the future, I locked away inside the steel trap of my mind.

My physical enhancement was just as important. I ate healthy, rarely drank alcohol, stayed away from the drugs of my childhood, got eight hours of sleep every night, worked out in the Gazzo estate's gymnasium, and swam in Lake Michigan every Saturday to get used to the shock of cold.

It was not long until my comrades in organized crime began to take notice of how different I was from them. I did not drink, nor take part in their off-duty celebrations at strip clubs and Irish bars. Prostitutes I stayed away from—one does not intelligently risk one's life for a few minutes of thrusting, only to spend the rest of his life with an incurable disease, protection or no—and when asked why I did not buy women, I answered truthfully.

Why spend money on sex, when I could get it for free?

My level of attraction to the opposite sex is not something that I can accurately describe. I do know that during this time I was in a prime state of health, and I made certain to keep my appearance well maintained through high-quality clothing and grooming, the mark of any man looking to be his best. To be perfectly honest, I have never tried to seduce or manipulate a woman into wanting me, even in the midst of my teenage years. Yet somehow the only time I ever slept alone was when I chose to.

The only reason I can think of this occurring is because I was different from my comrades: no matter what task I performed, whether it was shaving my face or planning a hit, I did to the absolute best of my ability.

This exquisite obsession to detail earned me an opportunity for advancement, handed down to my through my superiors in the family. They visited me in my apartment one evening, unannounced, finding me in the process of leaving my shower with a towel wrapped around my waist.


	3. Chapter 3

**"If you're good at anticipating the human mind, it leaves nothing to chance."**

**Jigsaw**

I stepped into my living room and found Sarah Gazzo—daughter of Sergio Gazzo, the head of the family—sitting cross-legged on my couch, a snifter of red wine in one hand and my remote control in the other. Three of her constant bodyguards were mulling around the rest of the apartment, examining my organized work space, library, desk, and kitchen.

"Johnny?" Sarah asked lazily, a cat's smile tugging at her lips when I walked out of the bathroom. "Why is it that you have a remote, but no TV?"

"I do not want a TV." It was difficult to keep a calm demeanor, but not impossible. Sarah was a stereotype: the daughter of royalty, she had a sharp mind and definite experience in dealing with men. The first time I met her, I'd made a solemn promise to myself to never try to be anything more than a gentleman to her. Some sharks should just not be fished for. "That remote controls my sound system."

"Mm." She gazed over at my collection of CDs, filling an entire bookcase from floor to ceiling. "I was wondering what you spent your money on."

I thought about asking permission to change into clothes, but thought better of it. You treat sharks with respect, but an act of feeling insecure about my state of dress would be nothing but blood in the water for Sarah.

"I had a look around the place," she continued, standing and walking into my kitchen. I keep three bottles of wine on a rack, and she uncorked a forty-year-old red to refill her glass. "Everything's so neat and organized. I have to say, I'm surprised. No pizza boxes lying by the trash. No porn stacked by the mattress. Hell, Marcone, you don't seem to do anything in here beside listen to music and read."

That did not require a response. It would have been mannerly to fill the apartment with idle chatter, but it takes an actual desire for conversation to realistically create it.

Sarah seemed to get the message.

"Where do you keep your gun?" she asked. Straightforward.

"Which one?"

Another smile, this one belonging more to a dragon than a cat, graced her features. "Ah, that's _so_ like you, Johnny. 'Which one?' like you've got an armory hidden in here somewhere." She drained her glass in one tip. "My boys searched the entire place, and you know what? They couldn't find a single one _anywhere."_

"You should hire better boys. Ma'am."

Though we were definitely born of the same decade, Sarah was older than me, chronologically. Of that I was certain, just as I was certain that she smoked, partook of her father's drug trafficking, and enjoyed her liquor. The combination of the three was finally catching up with her, a young woman in her twenties, and she was beginning the first steps down the road to showing signs of age. The title of _ma'am_ was more insult than anything I could have thrown at her, but I did not express anything but respect in my tone and mannerisms.

Sometimes, obeying the rules of the high society game can really piss a girl off.

"This is good wine." She picked up the bottle and drank straight from its neck. "Shame you've only got three. Would you mind if I borrowed them? My family and I love to share the finer things in life."

I fought my own tongue, and instead lifted one hand in a submissive gesture of _go ahead_. "What's mine is yours."

"You're such a gentleman," she said, tone brisk and clipped. "A dying breed." She put the bottle down and stared at me, face blank. "Your guns. How many, and where?"

"Seven." I gestured to my bookshelves lining all four walls of the living room. "Three revolvers in the Tolkien trilogy. A .22 inside _Don Quixote_. In my bedroom you'll find a twenty-gauge shotgun sewn inside the mattress. There's a Glock nine hidden in the Bible, and a forty-four magnum inside that clay vase next to your left arm."

Sarah looked at the vase, blinked, and then returned her gaze to me. "That's only six."

In response, I dropped my towel.

Attached to the inside of my left thigh, snug in its elastic holster, was a cop issue nine millimeter SIG.

She elevated me to a general on the spot.

The position of general was the only reason why I'd joined the family to begin with. I did not plan to spend the rest of my life flattering the vanity of the Gazzos by carrying out their orders and leading their thugs. I was there to learn, and nothing else.

I was ready to build my own empire.

I'd known what I was going to do for quite some time now—I had dreamed it up a decade before, and spent every intervening day of my life redefining its design until I knew it would be possible, and make me the most powerful man alive.

My empire was why I had taught myself the art of drug making and trafficking, why I had trained myself to ignore parties and hedonistic vices, why I'd spent years serving as an errand boy and killer of rival syndicate members. My empire was the reason I had devoted my life to the study of all conceivable elements of strategy and unconventional warfare.

There are some people, today, who have spoken of the criminal world I have created, and claimed it to be a psychological compensation for my lowly birth. Others have called it a badge of my self-creation. Still others have named it a symbol of power, a fetish, a talisman against self-doubt that maybe, just maybe, I was nothing more than a little boy crying for Mommy not to take her own life. All of these people have one defining trait in common.

They are idiots.

The circumstances of my birth are irrelevant. I have no need for a "badge" of any kind, because I _am_ the proof of my self-creation. And my empire is not, nor has it ever been, a symbol of power, nor of anything else. It's not a symbol.

It _is_ power.

But I am getting ahead of myself…

After my promotion, I delved deeply into the histories of guerrilla warfare, coup d'états, and organized crime systems being destroyed from the inside out. I invented some strategies of my own, going days at a time without sleep, learning to use activity and focus to keep myself alert, for my nights were passed risking everything to set up the dominoes that would topple not only the Gazzo family, but every other major crime syndicate in the state of Illinois.

I learned to make my own men, thugs older and more experienced than me by decades, do not only all the work I used to do, but unwittingly give me information about every other important member of the family as well.

Most of all, I set up dominoes. Plans. Gambits.

One black midnight, I, alone, without witness, assistant, or aide, placed seven bombs in the vehicles and homes of five different crime lords. Including Sergio Gazzo. There were witnesses.

Sarah took her father's place on the throne. She had been well educated by him. The title of kingpin was hers by right, and she was beyond prepared to take it. The family would stay strong—they had, indeed, prepared for just such an occasion, as mob bosses are notoriously prone to being killed. Everyone agreed that Sarah Gazzo was the prime person to continue leading the business.

I had, perhaps, a year to take her down. A year to set up a foundation to build my empire.

I worked, I learned, and I prepared. One cannot truly comprehend the importance of preparation until one has enemies on all sides.

When the morning came that Sarah Gazzo was reported to have made her first solo cartel plan with the newly returning Colombians, I knew that the time had come. I got my orders for the day, relayed them to my soldiers, and walked out of the Gazzo mansion, never to return, just like leaving the slums of my childhood and the orphanage of my youth. This time, I did not look back.

First, I blew up my apartment.

Then I assassinated the five other generals in the family, all in the same day. I took their heads and stuffed them into gym bags.

My soldiers were loyal to me. I'd requested that all of the new recruits were to report to me—after all, who better to lead the new guys than a new guy? I'd made them my own loyal privates, riding around in a black Hummer with armored siding and bulletproof windows. And after they'd relayed a message from me to every other criminal family in the city, I made sure that all of my men were killed when I rammed their Hummer with a stolen eighteen wheeler.

The crash did not kill them all.

The grenades I tossed beneath their wrecked vehicle took care of that.

Their last assignment had been to deliver messages to the other organizations that reported to Sarah Gazzo. These were men who dealt with drugs, prostitution, and so on—the money makers of the family. They stayed far away from the actual members of the family—royalty do not associate with peasants—and as a result none of them had ever seen me before.

I had them all gather at an abandoned warehouse.

It would have been easy to kill them.

But my plans relied on them.

And so, I revealed everything to them. My plans to take down the Gazzos. My years of treachery disguised as service. My designs for the future. Still, I was young, and the group of hardened criminals was little impressed by my proposal.

That changed when I showed them the heads of my fellow generals.

"Make no mistake," I told them. "I am not offering a job to you. I am not here to convince you of anything. I am here to show you that this is the way things are now."

Their various reactions were a predictable mess of rejections to that reality.

"Understand that the future has changed in your favor. Your employers are all either dead, or dying. I'm offering you a chance to not only continue staying in business, but also improve your profits. Keep doing whatever it is that you've been doing. I've studied the kind of money system you've all been living under for the past decade; the Gazzos take fifty percent of what you make. I only require ten."

These numbers were very attractive.


	4. Chapter 4

**"Humans aren't chess pieces, they do after all have free will—to some degree—but a good player can still use them. In fact, playing humans is harder. Or maybe I should say it simply requires different skills."**

**Senna Wales**

When the time came for Sarah and I to part ways forever, I made certain that my sense of poetic justice would be upheld. Like everything, I had planned this event for years, and I knew that every Tuesday night she spent the evening in a foursome of male hookers. They were required to wait on her, in various stages of undress, while she took a solitary bath.

Getting them to leave the room was easy. I just had to tell them the truth.

They were thankful enough to leave silently.

When Sarah came out of the shower room, wrapped in a towel, no less, I found myself unable to smile. I had thought that such a reversal of our positions in life would be more…final. Like coming to the end of a long marathon. Instead, I felt enjoyment so profound that my face muscles froze for a split second. She would probably think I was stunned speechless by her beauty. In reality, I was overjoyed that my new life, the life I had worked so hard for, was finally here.

When she saw me, a ghost, calmly sitting on a lounge chair by the fireplace, a book from her massive library opened on my lap, Sarah froze. For a long time neither of us did anything. Simply watching, waiting, seeing what the other would do. I could afford to wait and stare. She was beautiful to look at, yes, but there was more to it. Sarah was plagued by the same curse that every intelligent narcissist has: she had to know. And I'd provided her with plenty of questions.

Why wasn't I dead? Where were her boys? How did I get past security? What the hell did I have planned?

She chose to ask, "Which book are you reading?"

"Dostoyevsky."

"Oh?" She raised an eyebrow. "Who's it by?"

The sheer idiocy of that question didn't merit an answer. I hoped it was a joke.

When she saw that I wasn't going to answer, reality seemed to settle in for her. No one around. No witnesses. No safety in numbers. No guards. Her playing field, yes, but I'd had who knows how long to scope the place out? She was in uncharted waters, and found that her lifeboat had a hole in it.

Her answer was to open her towel and pull out the .22 pistol kept in a thigh holster.

I kept my hands out in the open, resting on the book, and said, "You're not going to like how this ends."

She smirked at that and sighted down the barrel to my left eye. "I'll regret it in the morning?"

"In the morning you'll be dead."

"I could say the same for you."

"You know I'm not an idiot. How likely is it that I'd walk in here, interrupt your evening, and threaten you without knowing that I'd get away with it?"

Her eyes widened, and her knuckles shone white against the gun. "I guess we'll find out. Won't we?"

She pulled the trigger.

The gunshot was loud, and it rocked her hand a little, but a .22 is a lady's gun. Her aim was pinpoint accurate. Which would have been a problem, if I hadn't known that Sarah Gazzo was a creature who had never had an original thought in her life.

I closed the enormous book and stood up, facing her. "You need to understand that our relationship has changed."

She stared. "You can't _do_ that!"

"Sorry," I said.

She pulled the trigger again, and the gunshot was just as loud. Then again. And another. I rolled my eyes on the fourth shot, rolling one hand in a gesture to just get on with it already and empty the clip.

When her trigger finger only produced empty clicks from her empty gun, I said, "You might want to take a seat. We should talk."

"It's a _trick_," she snarled."Some kind of trick—once my boys hear the shots, you'll be dead—"

"Your boys are either dead, or they work for me. Look at that gun in your hand. Think about who I am and what kind of world you are in. But most of all, wrap that towel around yourself and _sit down._"

The woman looked around her enormous bedroom, with a library that she never read from filled with books that were supposed to make her appear cultured, a giant fireplace, lit candles around the room, and wine red sheets on her four poster bed. There were most likely weapons hidden all over the place. And every one of them might well be empty, or filled with the blanks that I'd somehow slipped into her thigh pistol. Then slowly, very cautiously, she picked up her towel, wrapped it around herself like a cocktail dress, and adjusted herself onto the edge of her bed in a feline seated position, legs folded and hands at her sides, palms down, looking up at me with a decidedly more guarded expression.

"So."

"I know it's a surprise," I said. "But at your age, you should have learned that many truths we regard as absolute are, in fact, surprisingly flexible."

"I underestimated you. Everyone did."

"You always have."

"You can kill me at any time. You can make me do whatever you want."

I spread my hands. "Surprise. There's not much you can do for me."

"Even sex?"

I suppressed a cough. "Please."

"Why don't you even consider it? Why answer so quickly, Johnny? Why not just think about it for a second? For crying out loud, if you're gonna kill me, at least act like a bastard and have me crawl on all fours, begging to slip my lips around your cock."

"You might as well ask me why I had you put that towel back on. Or why I haven't insisted on you calling me Mr. Marcone, or why I haven't stolen any of your valuable bottles of wine," I said. "The answer to all three is because I possess something that you, and your family, lack."

"And that is?"

"Manners."

The lady's response was a contemptuous snort.

I smiled. "Manners are commonly mocked by those who have none, just as education is mocked by ignorant, refinement by the couth, and intellect," I said, with a tiny sigh of apology, "by the stupid."

"Who the hell _cares_, Johnny?"

"My manners, for better or worse, are keeping this conversation civil."

"Says the guy who's taunting a naked girl."

"Half-naked. That's the most cloth I've ever seen covering your body, by the way. And I would never taunt someone that I control," I pointed out. "To mock those who have power _over _you is a valid occupation of anyone with the wits to do so: witness satirists, court jesters, and political radio hosts across the world. Rulers who mock their subjects, on the other hand, only advertise how unfit they are for the position they hold. Taunting the helpless is the specialty of scumbags, assholes, and doltish sluts like you." I lifted a hand before she could respond. "No disrespect intended; I use _doltish slut_ in its technical sense: a hormonally-driven idiot."

"You're too kind."

"It's not that you don't know how to think. It's just that you don't like to."

"You're enjoying this, aren't you?"

"No more than is appropriate, I hope," I said with a very thin smile. "When I turn to leave and walk out of this room, it would be wise for you to not attack me. It's important that you don't make any sudden move, and that you make no attempt to get up from where you're sitting."

The woman blinked. "When you _leave—?_"

"Yes."

"You're joking."

I shrugged. "We've known each other for a few years, Sarah. That's a substantial fraction for both of our lives. In that time, we both have never reached a true understanding. Our relationship has been a structure of your domination set against my services. I would prefer not to simply reverse that dynamic."

"If you let me go," she pointed out, "any _reversing of that dynamic_ is over as soon as I get the hell away from you and hire a crew to take you out."

"Which is why you'll be free to do so."

"You sound like you actually mean that."

"I'm done _taking_ from you, Sarah. I have no more interest in your freedom than I have in your life."

"So I'm not going to die because of you?"

I paused. Then I tapped my chin, lost in thought. "That depends on who you ask, I'm afraid."

She went silent, but her eyes widened in fear.

"You were killed about one year ago, Sarah. Everyone in your family was killed. You just haven't dropped dead yet because the symptoms are just beginning and your bodies don't yet realize how they've been turned into fertilizer."

Her voice went very quiet and very, very frightened. "What did you do?"

"What did _I_ do?" I shook my head. "Oh, no, Sarah. This is about what _you_ have done. You killed yourself, of that I'm certain. You put the bottle to your head and pulled the trigger. The only question is, how many other people did you share that bottle with?"

"The _bottle—?"_

"Red wine. An Italian favorite. Did you ever wonder why I, a self-professed nonalcoholic, kept three such bottles ready in my apartment?"

One hand touched her throat. "Poison," she whispered.

"No. Something much worse," I said. "It takes forever to kill you. And there is no cure."

"You're lying," she said, shaking her head. "There's nothing out there like that. There's no poisons _ever_, in the entire _history_ of the—!"

"I added three drops of blood to each bottle, Sarah. That blood is what killed you."

She looked at me like I was crazy.

"Not my blood. This blood came from a whore. From the street. I made sure to have it tested, to make certain that it held exactly the right kind of virus that would kill you. And I put it inside something that you were certain to drink, no questions asked."

I stood up, pulled my jacket on, and looked her dead in the eye. "Sarah. You now have AIDS."


End file.
